Brokerage architecture for stock photo industry

The Internet has grown to become a major component of the global world-wide network infrastructure, linking millions of users. We first address the need for an electronic market and match-making between consumers and providers on the Internet for the stock photo industry. We discuss business issues and highlight technologies required to support an electronic market image exchange on the global Internet, including multimedia databases, visual query interfaces, visualization tools, and watermarking techniques. Finally, we summarize the operational flows and brokerage services provided by the brokerage system.